Friday, June 18, 2004

Thanks to all of you who wrote in on the Firefox issue: I uninstalled version 9, and reinstalled version 8, and yes, all of my bookmarks, extensions etc were still there. I think I'll stick with version 8 for a bit.

Thanks to those of you who pointed out that the Amazon Link from yesterday is no longer to something called "The" but is now to the Spanish-Language version of "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish"...

Hi Neil, I think you'll find that the Spanish book you mentioned is, based on a translation by a person who only took Spanish for a few months in school (me), the Spanish translation of "The Day I swapped my dad for two goldfish".

oh, and just a question I think I asked before but never saw a reply to: there were rumours a while back that DC was working on an comic book adaptation of Neverwhere... is there any truth to this? I'd love to see more Neverwhere, the DVD set really reiterated my love for both the series and the book.

I'm not sure that I'm meant to say anything about this until DC does its own press release, but yes. They are.

Neil-

Thank you SO MUCH for telling us about MOCCA. I had no idea this was going on next weekend, I had no idea about the museum, and the fact that I am going to be hanging out in NYC next week with a bunch of mates I think just sent my heart into arrest. I didn't think next week could get cooler: we're already hitting Lou Reed, the Pride Parade, MoS, Zen Palate, and broadway, but hearing about MOCCA, well...I can die happy right now.

Anyway, thanks thanks thanks I will definitely be poking my nose into the convention and if you bump into a girl with purple hair and a tendency to ramble when she's nervous, slap me upside the head. :)

Sax in Ohio, soon to be NYC

No, the cheap seats in NYC (and we use the word cheap here sort of loosely) are $60 each -- it's in the paragraph after one about the $1000 tables at http://www.harveyawards.org/news.htmlHi,

according to "marvel previews" (issue 10, august 04) the 1602 hardcover edition will be on sale 9/1/04. i thought that might be of interest for some of the readers of your blog.

Greetings from Germany,
captain_harlock

I'm sure it will be too. Thanks...

...

Last night some friends and I took Maddy to see The Pirates of Penzance at the Guthrie. Overall it was delightful -- Maddy, who had been expecting to be bored to tears, gave me an impressed thumbs up as the first scene ended, and spent the rest of the show glowing with joy. I didn't really mind the liberties taken (Queen Victoria descending in a balloon at the end)although I wished there had been some attempt to make the bits they wrote themselves sound even vaguely Gilbertian. I did wish that the Major General hadn't been staged as a sort of Music Hall "turn" -- someone convinced of how very funny he was and making sure we all knew it. Humour is funnier when it's straightfaced; or to put it another way, in this case we should be laughing at him, not with him. I think. But the plusses way outweighed the minuses -- fabulous pirates, for a start...

Other exciting things I did yesterday included signing a stack of stuff at DreamHaven (they have, it seems, been having a run on CDs since I mentioned them here last week, so I signed lots of CD booklets for Warning: Contains Language and Telling Tales), getting a haircut from Wendy at HairPolice (a woman who can make the single word "dude" perform pretty much any function in the English language) and eating at Midori's Floating World Cafe (amazing tea selection, nice sushi, great rice-balls): was aided and abetted in much of this by John M. Ford & Elise.

...

Dear Neil Gaiman,
I spent over an hour today trying to find an obscure entry in your journal archives where you listed all the gay men in your works, only to discover that Vandemar and Croup weren't on it, as I had somehow got the impression. I don't know much about making websites, but I know I don't ever want to go through that again, so do you think you could pretty please install some kind of keyword search on the archives? (Inserts variety of obsequious gestures to indicate that is not trying to order Neil Gaiman who is, after all, a god among men, around)
Eleanor

You are much too kind, and I'm not. But there is, really, truly, a search mechanism on the archives -- actually on the whole of the neilgaiman.com site. I'm sure we'll try and make it clearer and a little less hard to find on the next radical site redesign. If you're at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp then it's the magnifying glass with the word "search" in backwards writing underneath it on the top left of the page. It's also http://www.neilgaiman.com/search/search.asp.

...........................

Right. The bad news alluded to in the header... I'm going off to type up the work done so far on the novel. The place I'll be going has no internet access. Or phone. If I come up for air and to check for emergencies (and to see the Magnetic Fields next week), I'll post something to let you know I'm still alive, but if you don't see anything for the next week, assume that I'm away writing and that this is a good thing.